Letters · Erster Band · Theil I (1773)

That suffering according to God's will is the fairest service of God. Instruction on how to conduct oneself in mortification.

Bd I · Th I · Brief 102 · Der hundertundzweite Brief

Addressee — An Christiana Maria Griesenbeck (née Engels, 1707–1741), Mülheim — his most frequent correspondent; addressed "Geliebte Freundin und Schwester!" with the polite Ihr/euch.
Date — 30 April 1730, from Mülheim — five days after Brief 101, in the same Eastertide.
Provenance — Translated from the public-domain 1773 first edition (Theil I, pp. 291–294), in normalized GS 1845 orthography, collated against the 1845 Gesammelte Schriften, Hartman's 1819 reprint. All public-domain.

The Hundred and Second Letter.

That suffering according to God's will is the fairest service of God. Instruction on how to conduct oneself in mortification.

Beloved friend and sister!

I greet you in the name of Jesus, who would be your refuge and sure stronghold against all storms, in time and eternity! I have compassion on your weaknesses — yet all must work together for good. Sufferings are all the fruits of our sins; therefore we must humble and bow ourselves beneath them; but they are also, through the merits of the sufferings of Christ, means to our sanctification; and so we ought to embrace them with thankfulness, and not lose heart.

Ah, what strange ways must the Lord often take with us before we become truly gentle and thoroughly will-less; and yet there is no other means of coming to rest and union with Him. Let God, therefore, only have His way; He knows best how and where He must lay hold of you. We must serve God after His manner, and according to His good pleasure, without a choice of our own. To suffer according to God's will is a fair service of God. Do, then, receive your sufferings from God, and suffer them for God's sake, and they will fall the lighter on you and prove right blessed. Keep your mind, as far as may be, still in God, and your mind's stirrings undisturbed; else you harm your body and mind. All your anxieties, of whatever kind they be, suffer with resignation, without reflecting on what it is. Only bow and still yourself before God.

Your resolve and longing to mortify your appetites and desires is by no means in vain; one has, in that matter, more occasion for mortification when one eats than when one does not eat, and when one eats something pleasant (when one must do so) than when one otherwise eats dry bread. O fair and divine virtue of true detachment! A virtue not easily robbed from us by the enemies, because it is hidden from their eyes. For the rest, indigestible foods — as also foods too dainty and strongly spiced, or heating — are, by the principles of medicine, not good for your body. To eat too much, and everything that comes into one's mind, and often the most harmful things — that is surely not wholesome for you in your weak constitution, and only makes you truly ill. You may, and must, choose out what you can best bear; that is now the Lord's will for you, and can, as I said, consist very well with the mortifying of your appetites. If you cannot deny yourself in all this, and in such a manner as you would gladly wish, then consider that it is the best self-denial to suffer quietly the thing that is against our will: for so run the four chief articles of the Christian religion, as I am wont to name them. 1. Deny yourself. 2. Take up your cross. 3. Follow me. 4. Pray without ceasing.

Your desires for stillness, recollection, and the inward turning of the mind are likewise by no means fruitless; only one must never wish to practice them otherwise than according to the occasion, state, and grace into which God sets us. Exercise yourself in it as well as you can; but if at times, as it seems, you can do nothing at all, then tell the Lord, with a childlike look of love, what you would gladly do, and He takes the will for the deed. The satisfaction we might have in inward recollection must not be so dear to us as God's good pleasure, in which we can always abide — even amid our affairs, in pain and sickness, yea, in all inward darknesses and sufferings.

I offer you up, and all that is in and about you, to the Lord Jesus, for mighty reconciliation, keeping, cleansing, and perfecting in Him, who is our only hope and life; and I greet you in Him heartily, remaining, through grace,

Your weak fellow-combatant.

Mülheim, 30 April 1730.

❦

German

Der hundertundzweite Brief.

Daß das Leiden nach GOttes Willen der schönste GOttes-Dienst sey. Unterricht, wie sich in der Abtödtung zu verhalten.

Geliebte Freundin und Schwester!

Ich grüße euch im Namen JEsu, der eure Zuflucht und sicheres Schloß vor allem Ungewitter seyn wolle in Zeit und Ewigkeit!

— Opening lines of the original German. The complete transcription of all 605 letters appears in the forthcoming Encounter Press critical edition; Brief 1 is shown in full as a sample.

German text: public domain (1773–75 first edition / 1845 Gesammelte Schriften).

Translator’s notes

What this letter is. A letter of direction to Christiana Maria Griesenbeck, written five days after the Easter "peace" letter, on how to bear suffering. Its keynote is that suffering accepted from God's hand, and borne quietly for His sake, is not a misfortune to be escaped but "the fairest service of God." Around that Tersteegen sets a remarkably down-to-earth passage of counsel about food — she was in frail health — where the daily table becomes a gentle school of self-denial: eat what you can best bear, he says, for even choosing wisely can "consist very well with the mortifying of your appetites." He gathers the whole Christian life into four plain articles — deny yourself, take up your cross, follow Christ, pray without ceasing — and ends by offering her up entirely to Jesus, "who is our only hope and life."

A few words and echoes.

Mortification / self-denial (Abtödtung, Verläugnung). The dying-away of self-will and craving — not harsh self-punishment, but learning to want what God wants. Tersteegen makes it homely: it can be practiced at the dinner table.
Will-less (willenlos). His word for a soul so yielded that it no longer insists on its own way — the goal of all this suffering and self-denial.
"All must work together for good." Paul's promise (Romans) that God bends even our sufferings toward our good.
The four articles. Christ's own words gathered up: "deny yourself, take up your cross, follow me" (the Gospels) and "pray without ceasing" (Paul).
"He takes the will for the deed." When you truly want to pray or be still but cannot, God accepts the willing heart as if it were the accomplished act.
Detachment (Abgeschiedenheit). The freedom of a heart loosed from its cravings — a virtue, he says, "hidden from the enemy's eyes," and so not easily stolen.

Cite this letter

Gerhard Tersteegen, Geistliche und erbauliche Briefe, Erster Band, I. Theil, Brief 102 (Solingen, 1773–75); trans. Jarred Fenlason, https://gerhardtersteegen.com/letters/bdi-thi-102.html.

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